Blogroll

Meta

Gender Theory

By Robert Oscar Lopez, English Manif

Today I speak to you not as a bisexual, nor as the son of lesbians, nor even as an American. I speak to you as a Professor of Classics.

As is important for those who lecture on great literature, I teach many theories. There’s Marxism, the New Critics, Post-Modernism, Historical Epistemology, etc. I have nothing against the LGBT community; my favorite philosopher is Michel Foucault. My students study his writing.

But Gender Theory is not a theory. It’s a false ideology that dictates a social organization agenda to students. In a true classroom, the spirit ought to be one of debate, question, and examination of different points of view. Let me tell you about something that happened last year at the university where I work.

I was teaching the Iliad so that my students could consider the influence of antiquity on modern American authors. I received an e-mail from the “Office of Equality and Diversity” which required me to present myself to a lawyer in order to to defend myself against accusations by students whose names I did not know. The accusation: that I had been misogynistic and homophobic in the classroom.

The evidence against me was nothing but the assertions of anonymous students who had filed complaints against me, alleging that I had spoken in an unjust manner about Helen of Troy. Apparently, I wasn’t supposed to say that she had betrayed her husband. They said it was my obligation to officially say that she was the victim of a patriarchal system which detested Helen’s sexuality. Supposedly, since I never said, “Helen had the right to sleep with whomever she wanted, and it was nothing but the oppression of tradition that prevented her from doing so,” I was a misogynist and was at risk of losing my job.